Phillip Hammond popped up for a passive aggressive performance on the Today programme:

“We can look for efficiency savings which everyone should be seeking all the time. If we need to go beyond our efficiency savings, we would need to have a discussion over how and where these would be achieved.”

It sounds like defence secretary would make sure that conversation happened in public. He might not want to cut more troops, but there are still savings to be made. The MoD has 400 press officers and communications staff, for example. There is a battalion of cuts there Mr Hammond.

The latest figures for the numbers involved in specialist communications roles are for financial year 2009-10 and were produced in support of a Cabinet Office led exercise to capture such information across Government. They are as follows:

MOD/armed forces

Trading funds

Non-departmental public bodies

Press officers

112

8

1

Internal communications officers

52

8

0

External communications officers

365

26

0

Communications strategy officers

67

2.5

0

Other

101

7

3

Presumably these numbers have been reduced over the last three years.697 spin-doctors of one kind or another is 600 too many…